[citation][nom]TA152H[/nom]Well, since the Pentium Pro, processor development has slowed down a lot, and even the Pentium Pro wasn't as big an advance over the Pentium as the Pentium was over the 486, or the 486 was over the 386. The 286 was the biggest jump.It definitely gets more difficult to improve processors each generation. You can point to the Conroe, but consider it wasn't a derivative of the Pentium 4, but the Pentium III/M and the performance improvement isn't very great considering it came out over five years after the Tualatin. The idiots keep getting excited by more cores, but that's far from a universal solution. Maybe they'll need to go back to the Pentium 4 design to get single threaded performance very high. I guess that's the problem they face, they can probably fix the Pentium 4 to get very high single threaded performance, but it wouldn't lend itself to multiple cores as well because it's more power hungry. The Nehalem derivatives can't really improve IPC much anymore, it seems, and run at relatively low clock speeds, but are relatively low power, so work better in many cores.I'd be very curious what kind of clock speeds the Pentium 4 would run at on 32nm. If they added another decoder, and did other tweaks, you'd probably see very high single threaded performance. I wonder if they'll ever use that design again and fix it so it actually works.[/citation]
I agree except for maybe the P4 part.
The change from 8086 to 286 was quite the quantum leap. I had a 286 25Mhz and my buddy's XT felt like it was a dinosaur in comparison. 386's with math co-processors and DX 486s were a big change too. Wathching those machines first run X-Wing, Links 386 then Wing Commander 2 was amazing stuff back then.
I agree on Pentium Pro too. I had a PPro 180 and it didn't feel any better than a 200mmx, even when I tried NT 4.0 which the RISC/CISC on-CPU cache PPro was supposed to excel in. Hell even the first 233 PIIs which combined the two designs didn't blow me away like the old generation changes did.
My Dual PII 333 NT 4 box was probably the first big wow in years. I could watch videos, run a quake II dedicated server minimized, fire up another quake II instance in an OpenGL window and log into the server, while playing MP3s in Winamp with OpenGL visualizations all at the same time with no slowdowns. I laughed when Dual cores became the big "new" thing. Over ten year old workstation idea made new again. Then when Q6600 came out I was reminded of my buddy's really old Quad PPro 200 lol
I don't know about P4 though. Sure the first time I built my buddy's 3.06 HT Northwood with a gig of 1066 RDRAM I was very impressed but even a 1.6 Core 2 kicks my old OC'd 3.73 P4's butt in lots of apps. It seems eve if you can get rid of the heat, Netburst can give you high clocks but diminishing returns in performance due to the deep pipeline.